Southern Agrarian Writers
A reader of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, quite possibly the best political fiction we have (also, the recent film is quite good and follows the book closely), will receive an introduction to an overlooked style of American literature employed by some unjustly overlooked Catholic authors, Walker Percy first among them. This is the Southern Agrarian tradition. These thinkers, whose chief outlets were small circulation periodicals of literary and cultural criticism, emphasized religiosity, the identity of locality, the protection of civil society and its mediating institutions, family traditionalism, pride of history and heritage, and anti-interventionism. They actively opposed communism, corporate and social welfare, demographic change, and governmental, union, or corporate authoritarianism. Never organized, rarely agreeing, occasionally disagreeable, but united by sentiment, their influence still resonates. For these figures, a modernity overly enamored with economy, power, and material accumulation was insufficiently concerned with the content and development of family and civic character. Restraint, humility, and a more responsible (that is, cautious) personal stewardship were highly valued. They sought the local and the old rather than the global, the new, the abstract, or the ideological. Southern agrarians generally believed that family is the most crucial institution, and the very foundation of a good society which faithfully adheres to permanent things and ancient moral truths.
Against these stand both big government and big business, which look out for each other at the expense of community-based moral custom. M. E. Bradford told the Heritage Foundation in a 1986 lecture: “All of our social myths presupposed some version of the corporate life – that man is a social being, fulfilled only in the natural associations built upon common experience, upon the ties of blood and friendship.” No president can unite a concern for social health, however eloquently expressed, with the valued traditions of a community. Such a task must fall to smaller units of organization. Otherwise, a spirited passion – such as the temptation among government officials to create equality of outcome – “threatens to swallow up our reverence for law, responsible character, moral principle, and inherited prescription.”
Southern agrarian critics of expansive governmental power continuously expressed hostility toward perceived threats to living in a more sanctified and noble way. Among the most persistent of these threats were destruction to enduring and valued mediating institutions between the family and the state. A decline of these institutions damages group cohesion. The means of destruction include militarization, industrialization, growth in the size and scope of government, and the rapid imposition of a cultural decay made possible by new technologies. And so religion and politics, for example, were not to be synonyms – there is no “moral equivalent to war.” The failure to make a distinction might make one susceptible to the messianism of centralizers like Wilson and the Roosevelts, presidents perceived by agrarians to utilize foreign conflict as an instrument of domestic control. Such presidents were also perceived as being a friend of not only big government, but capitalists bent on making big industry bigger. These were false, synthetic communities, the products of coerced unity. Instead, there should be the protection of the social order – family, neighborhood, local community, and region foremost – from the ravishments of the centralized political state.
The language of southern agrarianism conveyed that it is easier to destroy than to create. There was skepticism of attempts to remake community in obedience to an all-encompassing political or social goal. The language is infused with a moralizing sentiment and set against relativism and ideology. Agrarian writers presented their readers with a language of impending defeat, even as they nobly fortify against the impending flood. Metaphors of struggle abound in the texts. John Crowe Ransom’s manifesto I’ll Take My Stand stated that the South, “looking defensively about her in all directions upon an industrial world,” must not succumb to the “weapons of industrialism.” He then asks: “Will the Southern establishment, the most substantial exhibit on this continent of a society of the European and historic order, be completely crumbled by the powerful acid of the Great Progressive Principle?” The defeat of the Civil War, he continues, has physically impaired the ability of the region to present “an attractive example of its philosophy in action,” the result being that the “American progressive principle has developed into a pure industrialism without any check from a Southern minority whose voice ceased to make itself heard.” Accompanying the siege mentality is a belief that the South represents humanist values universally applicable. A justification of regional sentiments is embodied in a dramatic narrative – one of loss and closed possibility. These arguments propose that threats imperil not only a nation or region but a critical element of civilization as well. The threat comes from an identifiable enemy – for Southern Agrarians, the atomizing forces of modernity – and a response, even if it is lament and retreat, is necessary.
The Southern Agrarian, highly attuned to the local, was a questioner of modernity and of the belief in constant progress. And so, given the confines of sinful humanity, they attempted to preserve for their audience some measure and memory of a lost good, of localism and family and a first altruism to those closest to them, the kinship, who need it the most.
Astonishing. A nostalgic post about a southern agrarian tradition that makes no reference of the fact that this “culture” was built on the backs of slaves, and sustained by the notion of white racial superiority until a few short years ago. Truly astonishing.
Actually: not so astonishing. Agrarian writers paid little attention to black southerners and weren’t particularly interested in arguments over politics, rights, or economy. Robert Penn Warren, the most famous of these, later said this was the wrong thing to do in both life and fiction (after his friendship with Ralph Ellison).
If you are interested in some possibly representative personal feelings on this question, the place to start would be the personal letters of Allen Tate, where he advocated for segregation (I haven’t read them yet).
Thanks for the nod to Walker Percy — his “Lost in the Cosmos” along with “The Thanatos Syndrome” were formative books in my college years. He’s definitely part of the great American Catholic Novelist tradition which encompasses Flannery O’Connor and even, I would argue, Ron Hansen (if Nebraska counts as the South :-) ). Every Catholic should read at least one Percy novel and the collected short stories of Flannery O’Connor.
And to those who would condemn any author just for living in a society which was built upon the backs of slaves (though slavery was made illegal 90-100 years before Percy wrote his first novel) I would submit you’d also have to throw out the writings of St. Paul, himself a Roman Citizen.
jonathan, I think that is precisely MM’s point?
…I would submit you’d also have to throw out the writings of St. Paul, himself a Roman Citizen.
Paul, however, actually DID write about — and critiqued — slavery in his time.
It’s also simplistic to call Paul a “Roman citizen.” Of course he was, and claimed as much at times. At other times he claimed he was a citizen of heaven and strongly criticized the Roman empire.
Good point, Michael J. Iafrate. St. Paul critiqued slavery, as did Walker Percy who critiqued slavery in “The Thanatos Syndrome,” also, in so doing, satarizing what had yet to be called “The Culture of Death,” but what is actually what that novel is all about.
And anyone who has been through public school in the last 40 years has read O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” which is at it’s heart a critique of the “Old South” form of implicit racism.
So it’s simplistic to say that the southern agrarians never addressed black southerners, which they in fact factor prominently in nearly all of Percy’s novels and many of O’Connor’s stories.
And it’s no more simplistic to say Paul was a Roman Citizen than to say he was a male human being. :-)
I should also probably add that for those curious about Percy’s novels, “The Tanatos Syndrome” is a powerful, nearly prophetic book, but something like “The Second Coming” would probably be more accessible (it’s a love story). Of course, “The Moviegoer” is what put him on the literary scene, nationally, so you’ll probably want to read that at some point, too.
er “Thanatos Syndrome”. Can’t type today (yes, I know how to spell “satirized” :-) ).
And it’s no more simplistic to say Paul was a Roman Citizen than to say he was a male human being. :-)
Paul’s religio-politico-cultural allegiances and identities were multiple and overlapping. To my knowledge his sex and gender identity was not. Although I’m in the middle of some research on queer theology, so who knows what I will discover.
I’ve been meaning to read some Percy for years now, but I rarely read fiction so I have been putting it off.
Walker Percy’s critique of Southern slavery and its aftermath is probably more explicit in writings other than The Thanatos Syndrome. Love in the Ruins, the prequel to Thanatos, begins with the protagonist reflecting on whether slavery was a sort of original sin for America, for example. Early in his career, Percy also wrote an essay, “The Failure and the Hope,” about race relations in the South.
O’Connor has a mixed record on race. She supported (I think) the return of blacks to Africa (as did many African-Americans) at the time.
FO was certainly aware of her milieu, and had much to love and admire about it. To dismiss the whole Southern culture in a few keys of the keyboard is nonsense. FO was equally aware of Eastern, white, sophisticated, patronizing racism perpetuated under the guise of “taking care of the blacks.” The opening chapter of Wise Blood gives a good picture of her great distaste for noxious easterners (whom she lived amongst and left reluctantly for a fated existence in Milledgville, GA).
She does not give blacks much of a voice in her fiction. Although one can argue that Buford is one of the heroes of The Violent Bear It Away. Her “The Artificial Nigger” is worth the read as well.
But before you read anything, read “Parker’s Back.” It aint got nuttin’ do wit race, but it is her best fikshun. Gawd above! It is good!
Percy’s The Moviegoer is grand. Life is only fulfilled in the Church. End of story. Beautiful. Thanatos Syndrome is an angry book. Which is why I think it would be quite popular among many Vox Nova readers!
Few things beat Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, I might add.
Predictable reactions to a post about the Southern Agrarian writers.
Thanks for pointing that out, Rufus. I’d completely forgotten about the original-sin observation in “Love in the Ruins” (which is kind of a part I to the saga completed in “The Thanatos Syndrome”, if I’m remembering my Percy novel couplets correctly… “Last Gentleman” and “Second Coming” was the other couplet, right?).
And yeah, I agree with Brett: “Lost in the Cosmos” is life-changing… the bit on our first encounter with an alien race and the suggestion that suicide can be a cure for depression were particularly thought-provoking (and will stay with me until I die — not from suicide, I might add!)… and even though it was written in the 1980s, the book will be forever relevant, even if Phil Donahue passes from this realm someday).
I almost made a Phil Donahue remark!
It is not accurate to call Percy a Southern Agrarian. Really, it’s not. He didn’t even publish a novel until, what – 1962? and his novels are not expressive of the Southern Agrarian themes at all. They are satiric, existential and critiques of place and culture, not nostalgic rememberances.
Now, his uncle – perhaps (even though he predates Southern Agrarianism).
Percy’s emphasis upon living in a place in a community is a great reminder of the value of rootedness to all of us. He fully supported Abp. Rummel’s work to desegregate the Archdiocese of New Orleans school systems and was highly critical of those Catholics who supported the evil of racism. You can find a series of essays on the issues of the South in “Signposts in a Strange Land,” a collection of essays, articles, and addresses he gave that I think is better than his fiction. I see no reason why one can’t support the good of the South (and there was and is good) while condemning the evil.
Good post, JonathanJones-I’ve been reading some Wendell Berry lately, and Percy’s one of my favorite authors, as well as being most likely the singe greatest influence on my reading selections since I read the Moviegoer.
More Berry and O’Connor in a future consideration, I hope. They deserve it….
I agree that the “Southern Agrarian” writers–and Walker Percy IS a part of that tradition–are very important. For me, their political and social ideas represent the only genuinely “conservative” socio-political ideas in America.
Also, I think they are actually less “racist” than a lot of condescending liberal intellectuals from other regions of the United States. In fact, I think that their non-literary, more actively political associates in the South, during my lifetime there, have been Southern “liberals” like Judge Minor Wisdom, in New Orleans, who worked assiduously for the cause of enfranchisement of the African American community. I believe that none of those folks would have supported very many of the policies of the Bush Administration.
A few comments:
1) In my opinion, All The King’s Men is the greatest fiction work written in America, and possibly in the English language. There is a reason Warren was the first Poet Laurette of the United States.
2) Though we should consider racism in our evaluations of Southern Agrarian Literature, is it really inappropriate to nostalgically look back upon it? I think it’s perfectly appropriate. Criticize the works and their authors from our own perspective? Of course. But we must also critique them from within their own context.
3) Do we automatically consider anything written post-1972 with an eye towards abortion? No. Why would we automatically consider Southern Agrarian Literature with an eye towards racism?
Secondly,
In my own personal experience, I’m finding that Percy is being rediscovered by many Catholics in their 20s. Especially “Love in the Ruins.” In discussing the book with recent-readers, I find many are perceiving that today’s social problems are really identical to yesterday’s social problems (same problem, just different symptoms).
This reveals something about the Culture of Death (and its current expressions in modern thought). A Culture of Death has no real progression or growth. Though it claims to offer an exciting diversity of sins, it really only offers a small selection of mundane repetitions that take on many illusory faces.
I believe it is for this same reason that GK Chesterton remains relevant just as Percy remains relevant: they have diagnosed the real roots of our problem. Just because the symptoms change, the sickness remains the same.